L-Band Microwave Satellite Data and Model Simulations Over the Dry Chaco to Estimate Soil Moisture, Soil Temperature, Vegetation, and Soil Salinity

The Dry Chaco in South America is a semi-arid ecoregion prone to dryland salinization. In this region, we investigated coarse-scale surface soil moisture (SM), temperature, salinity and vegetation, using L-band microwave brightness temperature (TB) observations retrievals from the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Active Passive (SMAP) satellite missions, Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM) simulations, situ measurements within 26 sampled pixels. Across these pixels, satellite-based SM outperformed CLSM when evaluated against field data, forward TB simulations derived performed better than those estimates SMOS observations. for pixels was on average only 4 mg/g locally influenced including dielectric mixing model of radiative transfer (RTM) simulations. To explore potential retrieving together with other RTM parameters optimize over entire Chaco, inverted 10 years multi-angular data constraints temperature. However, latter modeled not sufficiently accurate factors such as open water were missing background constraints, so that effectively represented bulk correction constant, rather per se. retrieval scattering albedo roughness resulted realistic values.